In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, [EMAIL PROTECTED] says...
> It depends.
> What kinds of stat will you do?
> How much value do you put on your time?
> What disciplines do you work with?
> Who can you get help from?
> Who will go over you syntax and outputs to check your work?
>
> If you need to do a great deal of data transformation (e.g., recoding)
> and will be dealing with many kinds of data from different sources,
> then I would choose SPSS. It has the best human factors in GUI,
> consistency of syntax across procedures, vocabulary choice, clarity of
> documentation, and clarity of syntax code.
>
I don't agree with this description of SPSS at all. I would say its
syntax is the worst I've seen (compared to SAS, Stata, GLIM, BMDP). SPSS
syntax is unnecessarily verbose and certainly not consistent across
procedures. SPSS is good at elementary operations such as recode but poor
at advanced applications such as arrays, macros. It does have a good GUI
and its documentation is excellent. An important advantage is that SPSS
is well known, a lot of data is available in SPSS format and text books
often contain sample SPSS code.
SAS is another of the big players, sample code is common although data in
SAS format less so. It's got a much better command syntax than SPSS, very
extensive. Unfortunately, SAS is weak at some of the elementary
operations such as a recode, assigning value labels. In the 90s, SAS
focussed on business solutions and its statistical capabilities
stagnated. However, a new version was released this year, maybe they're
picking it up again.
I've started using Stata recently and it's quite good. It has a very
consistent syntax and a wide array of statistical procedures. It's very
fast, but less suited to very large datasets. Its macro capabilities are
excellent. It's also evolving at a faster rate than SAS or SPSS. An
interesting feature is the ability to take the survey design into
account, i.e. specify strata or clustering variables. It can do most of
what SAS can do with a much smaller footprint and for a lower price.
However, enough stat software advocacy. The original poster wanted to
extend the statistical capabilities of Excel. There have been posts to
this group about a commercial add-in for Excel that will do this, I don't
think it's been mentioned in this thread so far. Try a deja-news search.
I've seen that NAG also sells statistical add-ins for Excel, see
http://www.nag.co.uk/statistical_software.asp. There's also a freeware
statistical package "R" which apparently can interface with Excel. See
http://www.ci.tuwien.ac.at/R/contents.html. (R is an open source version
of S-plus, yet another statistical package). I haven't tried any of these
solutions, but I'd be interested in hearing other peoples experiences.
John Hendrickx
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